Ask HN: How can I make Jira work?

[thanksd]

I hate Jira, but I have to use it for work. The UI is cluttered and buggy, the site is heavy and slow-loading, and there is so much hidden configuration that I never know what my options are. But our company is all in on it, so I have to manage.

I'm the tech lead on a project with 5 other devs and am trying to get my head around all of the outstanding tickets for our project and decipher what tickets are actionable and what needs more grooming. I want to add clarity and direction but have a sinking feeling that the time spent "working" on tickets in Jira is not worth the time I'm not spending making actual code changes or working on more helpful forms of documentation for the team.

Is anyone here in a similar situation? And does anyone else have a methodology that has worked well for them with Jira?

[PaulHoule]

I have worked at places where I have really hated Jira, the worst one was a place that had it self-hosted on some ancient Linux server that would take 20+ seconds to load the form for creating a new ticket.

Where I work now we have Jira tuned up very well, we are using Jira hosted by Atlassian which performs well, also the project management people set it up very well for our workflow. I can't say a lot about how they did it because I wasn't involved in that, but I do know it is possible because I went from being a Jira hater to being completely satisfied.

[thanksd]

It's good to know that there is hope for a good configuration. I'll have to look into what options we have there.

[msantos]

If I was to pick one single topic that improved my overall experience with Jira the most, I would say mastering JQL.

With JQL you can add custom filters to boards and backlogs making it considerably easier to hone in and highlight and narrow down specific patterns.

You can also save/fav searches and filters based on complex JQL scenarios if you use a shared backlog and rely on custom labels to split work.

Here are some JQL ideas https://gist.github.com/mvsantos/e9b2530a97a6345c2668116ffef...

As for Jira general slowness, bug your instance's admin to run maintenance cleanups and purges more often particularly if you run a large shared instance. It won't solve the problem entirely, but might help depending on your instance size and typical usage.

Having clear baseline practices will help too, but don't go overboard and come up with dozens of rules. Keep it intuitive so that they quickly become second-nature, and not points of contention and friction.

[thanksd]

Thanks, I'll look into JQL some more. I had gotten frustrated before trying to figure out the syntax and available values. I think our instance is overflowing with options and different projects that use different ticket properties that it makes it hard to see what types of properties can be filtered on.

[RafDeren]

I had this exact experience at past companies. Company was locked into Jira, everyone hated it but had to use it. Switching to something else would have been a 2 year+ project... so not going to happen.

That's why a colleague of mine and I decided to build https://www.hurdle.dev/.

Syncs to a Jira project, so other stakeholders can continue looking at everything there, but the devs can work in a faster, less cluttered, more focused workspace.

Would be happy to show a demo if you'd like!

[Ro93]

Use a Jira integration and just use Asana